Personal Photography Projects

ROME—BLACK

Rome is a universe. Monumental.
Yet it possesses a lightheartedness that only a city like this—where death is ever-present—can have. Just think of the Colosseum.

That Roman irony and playful spirit.
Rome is love and a journey.
Modernity and tradition. Absolute beauty.
The sacred and the profane. Integration and fears.
Home, even for tourists. Surreal and symbolic.
Sensual and seductive. Christian and trendy.
Intimate and distracting. Exhausting and fulfilling.

You can’t talk about Rome without understanding its enormous contradictions.
Rome is a journey, a migration that spans a lifetime. Light and shadow.

This is my Rome.
Have a good trip, my friends; I hope you enjoy it at least as much as I did. Interpret it in your own way, freely. Just as I hope you will do throughout your lives.

Dedicated to the people I love.
Federico Zaza.

2020

In 2020, Rome experienced something rare: it stopped putting on a show.

The city remained there—monumental, eternal—but a void opened up around it that was not merely an absence: it was the essence itself becoming visible. Spaces that had once been filled suddenly became legible and immense. Time stretched out, warping. Distances altered our movements.

And in that moment of stillness, previously unseen images emerged—sometimes improbable, sometimes beautiful, sometimes surreal: a human and urban landscape that is unlikely to ever return to this state.

2020is neither nostalgia nor news. It is a visual memory: of a transformation that has swept through us and left distinct traces in Rome—in its rhythm, in its streets, in its people.

The story is divided into two chapters:one in black and whiteandone in color.